Page 27 of Good Vampires Go to Heaven

“I just thought that since we lost our teletransport powers, maybe we weren’t demon vampires anymore.” Patience sounded as if she were weeping.

“Dream on, baby!” Beau chided her. “Jasper would never let us go so easily.”

“What if—”

“Aaarrgh!” Regina hollered so loud, Zeb’s ears rang. “Will the lot of you get out of here? There’s no space in the bedroom for me to work.”

“What work? What’re you gonna do?” Beau wanted to know.

“What I tried to say before you idiots interrupted me was, it’s vangel blood that Zeb needs.”

“Oh,” several voices said as one.

“I’ve seen it happen before,” Regina said. “Well, only among vangels. But when one of the vangels got badly hurt in a battle with the Lucipires, the only thing that cured him in the end was taking blood from another vangel.”

There was silence for a moment. Followed by the sound of licking Lucipire lips. Beau said, “Lucky us, y’all! We just happen to have a vangel in this heah house.”

“Out!” Regina shouted.

“Do you think you would have enough to spare for us to have a taste, too?” Patience asked.

“Out!”

“Bet it would make my maggot potion tasty,” Grimelda cackled.

“Out!”

“Ah could make you,” Beau said, and Zeb could tell by the steely tone of his voice that he meant it.

“You could try, but then you’d never have anyone to intercede with Michael on your behalf,” Regina replied in an equally steely tone.

There was the sound of pushing and shoving and curses as several, presumably Lucipire bodies made their way through the door. Then, Zeb heard the door slam and the lock click.

He sensed Regina standing next to his bed (he could tell she was standing there by the strong cinnamon scent). She said, “Are you ready to party, big boy?”

You have no idea, he thought. The words wouldn’t emerge from his battered body, but other things did. Like fangs slowly emerging in his mouth and although he didn’t . . . couldn’t in his present state . . . have an erection he did feel aroused down below. Sort of a hot throb. Imagine that! He wasn’t surprised at the fangs, but he hadn’t been aroused by a woman in ages, literally. Not that this was a sexual arousal. Just a reaction to the possibility of vangel blood, which had to be richer than a virgin human.

“I’m either going to kill you or cure you,” Regina said, pressing her fingertips to his neck.

At the zing her mere touch caused, ricocheting with erotic, cinnamon ripples across his body, to all his extremities and the Happy Ground in between, he decided he couldn’t care less. He was drowning in waves of pleasure so intense it hurt. The yearning for completion was sweet agony. Who knew a man could experience sexual bliss without a hard-on?

If Satan knew about this kind of pleasure pain, he would have surely employed it back in the Horror cave dungeon. And he would have wrapped it somehow in erotic memories of his wife and all he’d lost.

Maybe he was still in that torture chamber. Maybe this was all a dream.

Maybe Regina really was Lucifer’s sister.

Chapter 6

Blood matters . . .

“I’ve never done this before,” Regina said to Zeb, though he was unconscious and probably couldn’t hear her. “You could say I’m a virgin, ha, ha, ha.”

She thought she heard a snicker, but when she looked closer, Zeb appeared dead to the world. Pun intended.

It’s not that Regina hadn’t taken blood before, or given it, during a human sinner saving. But that was different. When she came upon evil humans who wanted to repent, she needed to take a small amount of their tainted blood from their bodies, then inject a small amount of her more pure vangel blood into theirs. The blood ritual benefitted both the sinners and the vangels, sealing the sinners’ redemption, saving them from becoming Lucies, but also making a vangel’s skin stay a healthy tan color. Without it, vangel skin turned whiter and whiter, then almost translucent. Fighting and killing Lucipires had the same result. She remembered a time back in the early days of her vangeldom when she’d been living in a cave. One day, she’d noticed that she could see her veins and arteries through her transparent skin. Not a pretty sight! Talk about a jump start to getting her butt into vangel gear!

Of course, maintaining an attractive skin color was not the goal of the blood getting or letting. Saving sinners and killing Lucipires, that was the primary mission for a vangel.